Yesterday my day was totally turned around for the better when crisis struck. It was mid-morning and my manager was talking to me about our status reports when the lights flickered. Then the lights went completely off and all the computers shut down. That does it for me! My advice? Pack ‘er up and go home! I immediately got a huge smile on my face and thought of the time when our system used to crash at McDonalds. I was wondering how the white-color world faces crisis. My manager immediately walked away and ran for the phones and people started coming out of their offices. I followed the crowd, like an ambulance chaser. Surely good times were to come! My boss said that he saw smoke outside and thought it was a transformer that blew. Again, big grin from me. I don’t know why, but these things totally make me happy! The phones went down, the lights (except for the emergency lights), computers, the whole shebang.
I sat in the lobby and watched as cell phones were whipped out and people complained about not being able to get their work done. They were calling people to try and figure out what went wrong and then my manager said. "Yeah, the system is down." Oh how happy that made me! I immediately started bobbing my head side to side and had the words "The ssss..." before I realized that NO ONE would get it. So I resigned to sing it to myself, head still bobbing. Cowboy and A-Rez, you should totally appreciate that!
Me? I sat back, put my feet up on my CPU, and settled in to do some reading. I’m a big dork, and have been going through some of my old notes from my classes in college. Hey, no worries, right! The power’s out, not much you can do, so you might as well go with it and take a breather. It was odd, because our floor is divided into the “dark side” and the “light side.” The dark side houses all the developers, and is named such because they rarely turn their overhead lights on, and if they have any light at all, it comes from small desk lamp. Also, you hardly ever hear talking on that side of the office and they rarely come out. The light side is the sales side of the office, which is much louder and more exciting. That’s my side, so good times there! Anyways, with no computers, the developers were at a loss, and the energy malfunction drew them out of their offices, and every once in awhile, you would see one wandering aimlessly around, a confused look on their faces. Their worlds had been shattered! To celebrate the downed computers, my manager, the other secretary and I decided to go get smoothies. We were in the process of getting our coats and stuff when the lights went completely off - all the emergency lights too. Good call. So of course, the elevators don’t work (we’re on the 6th floor) and we have to take the stairs. No worries! But the stairways are PITCH black, which to me meant more fun. I was all gung-ho and ready for an adventure but my fellow ad. assistant refused to go down in the dark. We went back to my manager to give him the bad news, and he said that desperate times called for desperate measures, and we were getting our smoothies, dark stairways or not. So him and I set off to conquer the stairs, but the other lady wimped out and got a candle. How not fun! We were headed down when one of the maintenance guys came up with a flashlight to guide us down. He said all three backup emergency lights failed. Good to know. Yeah, so that adventure totally bombed. I’m sure he thought we were in some dire need to go outside and so we decided not to tell him that he had just walked six flights of stairs to guide us down so we could go get smoothies. Ah well. So we got our smoothies, and by the time we got back, they had fixed the problem. But it was fun while it lasted! We got a good three hours out of it. Our phone system was whacked out and they just got it fixed today. Oh the joys of office living!
